Easy Pinterest Strategies to Boost Your Traffic

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For the first couple of weeks after starting my Pinterest profile, I was just looking around trying to find my way.

I had read so many articles by experienced bloggers describing their Pinterest marketing strategies, but I couldn’t relate. No one told me that before seeing big results you have to establish your presence on Pinterest. What I really needed was a sort of guide for beginners. But there was nothing like that… so I started experimenting and, in this post, I would love to share with you what I have done so far. I will show you how to use Pinterest for your blog.

Since I started using Pinterest, my blog’s traffic has skyrocketed. What am I doing to make it happen? Here is my guide on how to use Pinterest for bloggers:

You can use this infographic on your blog!

GET A BUSINESS ACCOUNT

It’s absolutely vital that you get a business account for two reasons. Firstly, becausePinterest requires you to do so. Secondly, and also very important, because having a business account lets you verify your website and this gives you authority in Pinterest’s eyes. Plus, with a Business account, you can apply for rich pins (we will talk about this shortly) and get the analytics.

TELL PINTEREST WHO YOU ARE

I know this should be obvious, but just to be clear, when you get your account, please use your business name. With your name try to also explain what you do, write down some keywords to identify your niche. Fill in the about section explaining how you can help people and with lots of keywords.

Pinterest for bloggers is different than your private account. You need to help people find you and you can do so using keywords in a strategic way.

If you don’t know how to implement SEO for Pinterest, stay tuned because I’m writing an article on it right now.

BRAND YOUR PINTEREST PROFILE

Try to stay as close as you can to your website’s branding. Use the same colors and fonts. You can use your logo as profile image, however I noticed that using a photo of yourself makes people feel more connected to you. But if you decide to use a photo of yourself, make it professional.

Personalize your boards’ covers staying consistent with your brand. Also, for the topics of your boards, it is very important that you choose topics related to your niche.

If your blog is about travel, you want to attract people interested in travel; if you have too many boards on other topics, people will get confused and just leave your profile.

Keep your personal interests out of your business profile. (You can always make secret boards).

VERIFY YOUR WEBSITE

This will help increase your authority in Pinterest’s eyes. And it will also give you direct analytics of your domain.

You can verify your website in “settings.” To visit settings, hover your mouse over your profile image in the right corner of your profile (see image below).

Once you are in the settings, scroll down until you find the website field and put your URL there. Click on confirm website.

Unfortunately, given that my website has already been confirmed, I can’t show you the process step by step.

Anyway, Pinterest will give you some metatag (it’s like a kind of code) that you have to place on your website. So, copy the metadata that Pinterest gives you and:

CREATE A BOARD JUST FOR YOUR OWN PINS

Create a board where you will pin only your articles and make it the first in your profile.

This board will be really useful to those who want to know more about your work.

Having this board at the beginning of your profile will make your own pins more visible.

And, having a board just for your own articles will also help to better understand how your blog is doing on Pinterest, as Pinterest analytics show you the details for each board you have. In my case, for example, my analytics say that the board dedicated to my own work is usually the board that gets the most re-pins, this means that my articles are doing well.

CREATE A LOT OF BOARDS AND FILL THEM IN

Create numerous boards that are closely related to the interests of your niche.

To better understand your followers’ interests, go in the Pinterest analytics →People you reach → Interests and you’ll find out what your followers are following.

You should only integrate interests that are related to the topics of your blog in some way.

For example, I have a board called “Productivity.” It’s not necessarily blogging-related, but it’s something that people who follow my profile could be interested in. It is still related to the main topic as bloggers are probably looking for advice on how to be more productive.

You need lots of boards. Having several boards gives you the opportunity to pin lots of pins. Additionally, you can easily re-pin your own pins in more than one board.

However, create a board only if you know you can fill it in. Boards with too few pins look ugly, and can be a disappointment for people who find them. Most importantly, Pinterest considers active boards as the ones that get pinned often.

GET RICH PINS

Rich pins are prettier and more informative. When your pin appears on the home feed with hundreds of other pins, it will stand out more if it’s a rich pin.

Can you see the difference between the rich pin (on the screen above) and the pin that isn’t a rich pin (on the screen below)? The first one is nicer and gives more information about the article. The second pin isn’t a rich pin as it brings you to a landing page that isn’t on my website so I wasn’t able to make it rich.

But is that all? Nope! Rich pins are given priority by Pinterest so, Pinterest will show them more often and highest on the general home feed.

If you are a WordPress.org user, you can use the Yoast plugin to get rich pins.

If your blog is on Squarespace, once you have confirmed your website all you need to do is copy the URL from one of your pages and validate it on the Pinterest validator.

You only need to validate once. After that, all the articles you pin from your blog will show as rich pins, even ones you haven’t written yet.

Don’t freak out if your pins don’t become rich as soon as you validate your URL; it can take time.

MAKE YOUR PINS STAND OUT

Ok, this is another complex thing.

Your pins need to be the right size. 735×1200 is the size that I’m using and it seems to work.

Please try to avoid images with faces – they don’t work well on Pinterest.

The pins that work better are pins with writing on images. This kind of pin works better because those who find your pin can easily see what your pin is about. I know they could read the description, but while you are in the home feed with hundreds of pins, you don’t open each pin to read the description, do you? So why would someone do that for your pin?

However, be careful to ensure the writing on the pin is readable. Even if a font looks prettier, you should avoid it if it’s hard to read.

Having words in the image also helps with SEO.

Also, I have read somewhere that pins with red on them are doing better than others.

But unfortunately, it’s not always up to date. So, the strategy that I recommend to find good group boards is going to the Pinterest profile of one of the influencers on your niche and check to which group boards they participate in (usually group boards are at the end of the profile).

In this screenshot, you can see the community boards to which Melyssa Griffin collaborates. You can recognize easily identify community boards from the little circle on the lower left corner.

After you choose which board you would like to contribute to, find instructions on how to apply in the board description.

If there are no instructions, what I do is write a private message to the board owner (which is the first contributor on the left).

Firstly, I didn’t have time to go on Pinterest multiple times a day to pin manually. The other thing I really struggled with was pinning at the right times! I’m based in Australia and my audience is mostly from the U.S., so while my followers were on Pinterest, I was in bed.

Another thing that has helped me grow my Pinterest traffic is Tailwind Tribes.

Tailwind Tribes are a type of community boards where you can find pins to re-pin in your own boards and where you can add your own pins to be shared by other members. To read more about Tailwind Tribes go here.

IMPLEMENT PINTEREST SEO

This is the most important thing you can do. Pinterest for bloggers is not your standard social media – it works more like a search engine.

So, to be honest, it doesn’t really matter how many followers you have or how many times your pins have been re-pinned. What’s important is that when someone searches for something related to your article, your pin pops up.

Now, don’t get me wrong, everything is important: the more followers you have, the more people who get your pin in their home feed. The more re-pins you have, the more often your pins appear on Pinterest. All of this is good to raise your authority on Pinterest.

At the end of the day, what you want is more people coming over to your blog and the best way to get it is to implement SEO everywhere.

This is a big and very important topic so I’ll write a detailed post on it soon. This is one of the most important things to learn to understand how to use Pinterest for your blog.

MAKE YOUR WEBSITE PINTEREST FRIENDLY

Add a Pinterest follow button to your site so people can follow you on Pinterest easily.

You can also have a plugin that shows your Pinterest boards on your website. I decided not to have it as it was too heavy and would have slowed my site down.

However, I decided to install a plugin called MiloTree that lets me customize a discreet pop up that invites people to follow my Pinterest.

You can also choose different message like invite to follow on other social medias or subscribe to your newsletter, or you can choose to show a different message each time.

I love it because it’s really discrete, you can customize everything from the colors to the pop up delay, you can choose the positioning and how often it shows and bonus point it gives you analytics.

Only the image that you choose appears when someone clicks the share button so you won’t see your content go around with odd images as pins. And most importantly, your pin will go around with your description (obviously packed with keywords).

Unfortunately, Social Warfare can be used only on wordpress.org.

Some blogging sites recommended to upload the pinnable picture to a free image hosting site like imgBB or tinypic and then get the html code for our picture to use on our website.

So, when we first started we used to do that. We would get the code, check that the alt tag was okay (if not, we would change it to one of our choice for SEO purposes), and we would then use the following code on our blog to add the hidden picture to our posts:

So, if you can, as you are on WordPress, I really recommend getting the Social Warfare plugin.It only shows the picture that you have chosen, you can add a custom description, it’s affordable and it also has many benefit for other social networks.

GET FOLLOWERS

Even if you don’t really need to get lots of followers to grow on Pinterest (you can easily reach people through group boards, Tailwind Tribes, good SEO), having a good number is advisable as it gets you authority and gets your pins in front of more people.

Some tips to get more followers are:

Follow the followers of the leaders in your niche and the followers of big boards related to your niche. Not everyone will follow you back but a small percentage will. (don’t follow too many people in one day otherwise Pinterest could suspend your profile as a spammer)

Pin lots of pins from one single person, they will notice you.

Use the social part of Pinterest and comment on some pins or engage with some other users. I haven’t tested this strategy as I use Pinterest more as a search engine.

Promote your Pinterest profile on your other social media accounts, to your email list and on your own blog.

BONUS TIP: USE FACEBOOK GROUPS

While I’m not really into the like-for-like kind of threads, I’m absolutely in favor of the re-pin threads.

This is because while the “like-for-like” usually gets you followers not interested in your topic, with the re-pin thread:

You will increase the re-pin count of your pins and this is really useful to gain authority on Pinterest.

Even if the person who re-pins your pin from the thread isn’t in your niche, they will probably have some followers that are also interested in your niche and will find your pin valuable.

When you are going to put your pin in the thread, you should share the version of that specific pin that has got more re-pins. By doing this you will increase the re-pin count of an already strong pin and Pinterest will be happier to put that pin in the home feed. It will also increase your chance of seeing your pin re-pinned as a pin with a bigger number of re-pins is more attractive.

To check which version of a specific pin has been re-pinned the most you can go to

pinterest.com/source/yourdomain

(after source/ you have to put your blog URL)

Here you can see all the pins that have been pinned related to your blog.

So, this is what I’m doing on Pinterest right now and to be honest, my traffic skyrocketed after subscribing to Tailwind. I think that because you are using a scheduler, everything is more organized and you can be on Pinterest at any time without really be there. Tailwind also has so many featuresthat can help you grow your traffic. If you aren’t using it, you are missing out. You should try it for free.

The most important thing is that you should put your pins out there so try to participate in as many community boards as you can anduse Tailwind Tribes.

Join our Facebook group and you will find the invitations to our tribes (bonus: you can use Tailwind Tribes for free but our invitations come with a $15 credit should you decide to get Tailwind in the future).

If you have any questions or some new tip to share please leave them in the comments.

Can Pinterest work for something like my site, http://www.flatcircleblog.com? It is an entertainment blog and is probably less conducive to that platform than things like Facebook, twitter, etc. I started a Pinterest account, but did not see how it could be effective for this type of blog (entertainment, pop-culture, etc).

I know that there is the myth that Pinterest is only for crafting and wedding planning but it isn’t like that or at least not anymore.

You should look at Pinterest as a prettier Google.

With more than 150 million people every month, Pinterest is where people go to find ideas. Every kind of ideas! So, having a profile on Pinterest to showcase your content is the best move you can make.

In other words, if I need to pick what movie to watch next or what podcast to listen to, I’ll go to check on Pinterest. Probably, not everyone does that but do you know that your Pinterest’s boards rank on google and show in SERPs (search engine result pages) too?

By all means, I’m not saying that Twitter and Facebook aren’t good but on those platforms your posts are short-lived. They appear in the newsfeed for a couple of hours only to be replaced with some new content soon after. When you pin your blog post or your product on Pinterest it will be there forever.

Years down the track, you will still see traffic coming to your blog from that pin.

In summary, these are some of the reasons why I love Pinterest and advise everyone to have a profile on it 😊.

Great tips for learning how to use Pinterest. I’ve been using it for about a year. But to be honest, I wasn’t really focusing on learning it.

All I did was set up my pins on the auto scheduler and that was it. This month, I’ve finally decided that it was time to really start learning how to use the platform.

I’ve read so many bloggers say how much traffic they’ve been able to get from Pinterest. I can’t expect to continue doing the same thing that I’ve been doing and seeing success.

It does take time to start seeing traffic from Pinterest. But I can say that since I started focusing more on Pinterest from the middle of this month, I’ve already noticed an improvement in my traffic.

Now I just need to keep learning and implementing. Thanks for sharing these tips.

Hi Susan Thank you for stopping by. Yes, I think Pinterest is the best way to drive traffic to a new blog. Even though it’s true that it takes time to see a big spike in traffic, you can see results straight from the beginning. And what I like the most about it is that a pin has an average “lifespan” of 14 months!

I didn’t know that you can track which version of your pins is most popular!I am definitely investing in a Tailwind subscription next month. I started with the free plan right away and got very quickly to 25+K monthly views and about 2 months ago it reached the limit and I am down to 15K. I don’t see another solution to this since I work full-time and don’t have time to manual pin.

Hi marina Love this article! Pinned for later, would love to ask you a few questions about blogging love the fact you are from Australia. I have read heaps of blog posts all from us and would love to know more about blogging from aus… what would be the best way to reach you?

Hi Vanessa, Thank you. You can send me an email at marina@tinylovebug.com and I’m always around in our facebook group blogging for new bloggers. So you can make a post in the group tagging me. Whichever works best for you.

This is the best, most informative, easy to understand blog that talks about Pinterest. I have a new blog http://www.thiswanderlustheart.com and am trying really hard to learn Pinterest so I can drive traffic. Thank you!